Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India - Centre for Internet and ...

Dissertations (NDLTD) that promotes open access archiving of theses and dissertations,
with members in North America, Latin America, Australasia, Europe and Africa. 123
In an editorial in Current Science, Prof. N V Joshi reiterates the advantages of open
access: “… obvious that starting and filling an institutional e-print archive (containing the
peer-reviewed publications from the institution) is easy, inexpensive, and immensely
beneficial to all — a truly win-win-win situation. … A majority will be totally apathetic
towards it, at least in the beginning — such is the human tendency. However, the higher
powers (the funding agencies, especially the public/governments ones, though thankfully
not yet in India) are beginning to see the advantages of such archives being set up. This is
the surest way of truthfully declaring that the results of publicly funded research (at least,
in the form of peer reviewed scientific publications) are indeed accessible to the public.”
124
Many open access journals charge from the authors a manuscript processing or publishing
fee. No journal published in India charges a fee though. Both BioMed Central
(BMC) and Public Library of Science (PLoS) charge article processing fees as do many
other open access journals. BMC journals charge between $1,450 and 1,640, PLoS ONE
charges $1,350, and PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology $2,900, and other PLoS journals
$2,250. Should Indian scientists publish in journals that charge a fee? There are conflicting
views on this issue. Here are the views of three professors of Indian Institute of Science
on this issue. Prof. M Vijayan, former President of INSA, believes that the funding
agencies such as DST and DBT should include publication costs as an item in project
budget. 125 Indeed, in the West, both NIH and the Wellcome Trust do provide grants to
cover such costs charged not only by purely open access journals such as the BMC and
PLoS journals but also by toll-access journals which are ready to make individual articles
open access against a fee. Major publishers also enter into agreements with universities
under which if the university pays a certain amount of money annually, the faculty can
publish any number of papers without paying per paper fees. But Prof. P Balaram, opposes
this view vehemently: “As an Indian scientist, I do not want my government funds
to be subsidising…non-Indian open access journal. Some journals waive these charges
for authors from developing countries. But I do not think we should go begging for waivers.
They do nothing to counter the ever-present danger that authors who cannot pay will
be squeezed out.” 117 Talking about ‘pay to publish and read for free’ business model,
Raghavendra Gadagkar, renowned ecologist, says, “The argument that it is the granting
agency and not the author that pays does not wash” as the playing field for grants is
123 http://www.ndltd.org.
124
Joshi N V (2005), Institutional E-print Archives: Liberalizing Access to Scientific Research, Current
Science, 89: 421-422; http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/aug102005/421.pdf.
125
Vijayan M (2011), Structure of Indian Science: Suggestions on Operation of Competitive Grants, Current
Science, 100: 815-816.
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